Famous Reviews eBook

The essay is full of Mr. Darwin’s characteristic
excellences. It is a most readable book; full
of facts in natural history, old and new, of his collecting
and of his observing; and all of these are told in
his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into
picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the
colours of fancy and the lights of imagination.
It assumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained
argument upon a matter of the deepest interest, not
to naturalists only, or even to men of science exclusively,
but to every one who is interested in the history
of man and of the relations of nature around him to
the history and plan of creation.

With Mr. Darwin’s “argument” we
may say in the outset that we shall have much and
grave fault to find. But this does not make us
the less disposed to admire the singular excellences
of his work; and we will seek in limine to
give our readers a few examples of these. Here,
for instance, is a beautiful illustration of the wonderful
interdependence of nature—­of the golden
chain of unsuspected relations which bind together
all the mighty web which stretches from end to end
of this full and most diversified earth. Who,
as he listened to the musical hum of the great humble-bees,
or marked their ponderous flight from flower to flower,
and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their
work of suction, would have supposed that the multiplication
or diminution of their race, or the fruitfulness and
sterility of the red clover, depend as directly on
the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded
game-preserves on the watching of our keepers?
Yet this Mr. Darwin has discovered to be literally
the case:—­

From experiments which I have lately tried,
I have found that the visits of bees are necessary
for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but
humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium
pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar.
Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole
genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare
in England, the heartsease and red clover would become
very rare or wholly disappear. The number of
humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree
on the number of field-mice, which destroy their
combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended
to the habits of humble-bees, believes that “more
than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over
England.” Now the number of mice is largely
dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats;
and Mr. Newman says, “near villages and small
towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more
numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the
number of cats that destroy the mice.”
Hence, it is quite credible that the presence of
a feline animal in large numbers in a district might
determine, through the intervention, first of mice,
and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers
in that district.—­p. 74.